A gained and lost dominance score method with conflict analysis for green economy development evaluation

As an outranking-based multiple criteria decision-making method, the gained and lost dominance score (GLDS) method considers the loss aversion of the decision-makers who are more sensitive to the bad aspects of an alternative than the good ones. However, there are unresolved issues in the GLDS method, such as how to deal with numerical decision information, how to model the personalized risk tolerance attitudes of decision-makers, and how to identify soft preference relations and incomparability relations between alternatives. This study aims to address these issues and proposes an enhanced GLDS method with conflict analysis. Firstly, we define the possibility degree of an alternative to achieve the goal under each criterion considering the nonlinear cognition of decision-makers. To reflect the tolerance of a decision maker for the worst performance of an alternative, we introduce a parameter in the aggregation function to weigh the gained and lost dominance scores of each alternative. In addition, a conflict analysis framework is constructed to distinguish the preference, indifference, and incomparability relations between alternatives. Based on the above improvements, an enhanced GLDS method with conflict analysis is developed. We then demonstrate the applicability of the enhanced GLDS method by a case study about evaluating the green economy development levels of 21 cities in Sichuan, China. The comparative analysis of the case study shows that the proposed method has superiority in satisfying personalized requirements of decision-makers.